Daring Exchange of Ideas

Daring Exchange brings together different communities and groups to identify each others problems and jointly find sustainable non violent solution.

Target Group

Communities facing social, cultural and practical development problems and communities and groups in conflict over resources.

Objectives

To bring dynamic communities together and help to spread success and knowledge from one community to another. To overcome conflict for resources between different groups by providing a safe facilitated environment for them to develop alternatives to violence. Northern Kenya has little infrastructure and the harsh environment means that few people travel far beyond their own community centres. With no TV, Internet and poor access to radio, new ideas are hard to come by. Many ideas brought in by outside organisations, though well meaning, are just not suitable to the specific environment or simply not what people want.

Methods

We bring groups together and facilitate their discussions. Over several meetings we support them as they identify the root causes of each others problems and find solutions. Often one group will already have found answers to issues both groups share and the other will have answers to different problems. In cases of conflict resolution our role is to bring together a broad spectrum from within the communities involved and, with time and familiarity, enable these groups to develop alternative solutions to the issues behind the violence. The key to the success of this program is that the solutions are entirely their own, we only provide the support for them to find them; this makes the solutions much more sustainable.

What We Need

Our biggest requirement is transport. It is very important to the success of this project that a minimum of 20 members of each community is able to make the exchange trip. We also require trained facilitators with suitable language skills or translators and funding to provide simple meals and ‘chi’ (tea) at the meetings.